It was 1995, September to be exact, and the changing leaves in New Bedford were about to be shed by their trees by the words of protest poetry that was not angry, but compassionate, loving, understanding. I was a young 30, Dennis Brutus a very old 70, although he had one of the most energetic and passionate spirits for social justice that I have since met. "Incredible," I thought, "this dude's been shot, stabbed, imprisoned, tortured and exiled, and at his age he's still going at it, fighting the good fight!" I was sad to receive the e-mail the day of his death, the day after Christmas 2009, that said he had suffered from prostate cancer and passed away in his sleep. Yet another of my personal heroes was dead.

With Dennis Brutus, life was not so much about revolution, a word poets love to shout out and throw around far too much in their writing, but about actively protesting against oppression and living your politics. In the 15 years following my first meeting Dennis Brutus, until his death at 85, his question never seemed to change: "What have you been doing?"

The writing, it would seem, was secondary to Dennis. What mattered most was the protest, provocation and then the poetry of witness. In short, it always seemed that he wanted to know what you had to write about rather than what you had already written, and other silly things like at what rally you might have read it as part of a protest or social action.

Famed Beat poet Anne Waldman, a favorite poet of WOMR-FM's The Poets Cornerlisteners, said Dennis “was a poet of deep principle and conviction. A steady ethos that worked for sanity and justice and peace in the world. As well as being an authentic witness in his poetry. He was generous at the Kerouac School at Naropa and had a rapport with Allen Ginsberg. O where are the poet leaders of yesteryear who took their lives and work into public space?"

My last recollection of Dennis Brutus was in Washington, D.C. a few years back, at the Split This Rock festival, a week-long anti-war poetry protest fest. About 300 of us held a silent march on the White House in opposition to the Iraq War, and poetry broke out just outside the main gate, in Lafayette Park. Some police showed up with a dog, sniffed around and took the festival organizers’ info vitals, and then left us alone to proceed with our protest. I can still see the look on Dennis' face, watching the interrogation, as if it were the same Portuguese secret police officer in 1970 Mozambique who shot him in the back point-blank while he was trying to escape, so as not to end up in the anti-apartheid political prison Robben Island, which is where he ended up. The first fuve months were spent in solitary confinement, the next 11 in a cell with fellow apartheid resistance leader Nelson Mandela, and the two were literally shackled together while splitting rocks.

His death took the breath away from so many of us. Alicia Ostriker, a National Book Award recipient who has read on Cape both at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth, offered “my favorite quote from Shostakovich: ‘Art destroys silence.’"

Dennis Brutus was far from silent and his art certainly broke any silence lurking about. He read numerous times with Martin Espada, another poet-crowd favorite on Cape Cod, who teaches annually at Castle Hill in Truro and has read at the Cultural Center and the local community college.

"I knew him for almost 20 years and considered him a friend,” Espada said. “We read together several times. I was honored to take part in the events at Worcester State College when Dennis donated his papers there. I last saw him when we had dinner at Split This Rock. I wrote a poem for Dennis, called "Stone Hammered to Gravel," to mark the occasion of his 80th birthday. Now it's an elegy."

The poem can be viewed online at the website for Foreign Policy In Focus

http://www.fpif.org/articles/stone_hammered_to_gravel

The chant at the end of Espada's poem is the title of Brutus's first book, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, a book that New Bedford's poet laureate John Landry first had me read nearly 20 years ago. Again, it was the compassion and lack of anger in a political protest poem that initially took me aback. Even when Dennis read, his tone was not one of the typical rant, but more of a chant. His energy always filled the room, said former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky: "I met Dennis and heard him read several times over many years -- invited him to Wellesley in the ‘70s when I taught there, remember his electric presence and authority."

Said New Bedford poet laureate emeritus Everett Hoagland, "One can see from his accomplishments as an activist-organizer that he was an astute tactician and brave as could be. Yet he was as extraordinarily gracious with more ordinary people as he was courageous when facing and fighting the agents of hell-on-earth who were intent on oppressing or compromising the well-being of those people. He was a poet of great generosity and integrity. His actions were the afterlives of his words; his heroic life was his poetry in action."

Dennis Brutus helped to nurture young poet activists, particularly of African descent, thus living the life of a true revolutionary. “He was a beacon of light,” said Cape Cod's biker poet legend Colorado T. Sky, who was a student of Brutus's at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire. “I can still hear echoes of the grey lion!"

The last time myself, Mr. Sky and Dennis Brutus were all in the same place was two years ago at Split This Rock. We did lunch at the infamous poetry venue in DC, Busboys & Poets Cafe. Again, his first words to both of us were, "So, what have you been doing?"

With Dennis Brutus, it was poetry that expressed suffering and protested those business practices. He helped get South Africa banned from the Olympics in 1964 for racism against blacks and later declined induction into the South African Sports Hall of Fame for his accomplishment, simply saying, ""It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims." It wasn't about credit and padding a resume for Dennis Brutus; it was about results and social justice.

"He was a great source of strength, inspiration, and encouragement," said Landry. "His life is a model for the poet who stands up to the powers of oppression in living and in creating ways of looking at things other than those of the prescribed manner dictated by those who do not really care about the suffering their politics and business practices yield."